Writing to Remember.

On a sudden impulse to scribble, I hit 'create a new note'. Not because I have anything profound to say. Sometimes I simply panic when I notice I’m forgetting parts of my life that used to be my whole world. I sit and try hard to remember what used to give me great joy and inspiration as a child. I force myself, because I’m terrified of losing the bits and pieces that made me who I am. I find myself longing for the girl who desperately waited for spring, for the afternoon naps that would finally feel ethereal with the breeze coming through the crack of the fortochka. We could never fully close it. The winter cold had left its edges swollen, or something along those lines. I was never curious enough to find out why we couldn’t just fix it. 

I get this urge to write almost every week. I write to remember. I write because I know my memory will betray me. I write because it somehow gives me a sense of comfort, as if I’d lived all those years just yesterday. I write to make a sense of who my fifteen-year-old self was. At fifteen, I firmly believed that whenever something bad enough happened to make me cry, something good would happen the next day. Sometimes I pretended things were worse than they were, just so something good would be around the corner.

I write because I fear the day when it all loses its color and turns grey. 

And I write because it is a beautiful act, the words dancing around before they finally find their places, like dancers in an English country dance.  

I don’t write because I believe myself to be a good writer. I write to make a sense of my past, of my acts and beliefs. You’d be surprised how many patterns you’ll come to discover. Who you betrayed, and who you loved. As Sibylle Baier puts it, “I yearn, for the roots of the woods. That origin of all my strong and strange moods”. Another line I love from her song “I Lost Something in the Hills”: “when I felt mad and deprived, and only the slopes gave me hope.” The slopes become so evident when I write, the highs and lows. It becomes clear how much of each of our lives was left to chance. The happy moments and the sad ones, and the in-between ones that were so invisible in the living of it. 

I write so I don’t leave it all unexamined. After all, we only live so much.